Winner Takes All
How Casino Mogul Steve Wynn Won-and Lost-the High Stakes Gamble to Own Las Vegas
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3.9 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Three competing business titans strive to control the city of Las Vegas in this jaw-dropping historical tale.
Sin City. Bright lights, high stakes, and no sleep. Home to some of the world's grandest, flashiest, and most lucrative casino resorts, Las Vegas, with its multitude of attractions, draws some forty million tourists from around the world every year. But Vegas hasn't always been booming at the level it is today. This newest influx is largely a result of three competing business moguls. Meet Kirk Kerkorian, Steve Wynn, and Dr. Gary Loveman, men who couldn't be more different from one another, yet share the same tunnel-vision determination to conquer the city that feeds the world's fantasies.
No longer just a go-to city for gambling, as a result of Kerkorian, Wynn, and Loveman working to reach the top—and to top one another—Las Vegas is now home to restaurants run by some of the world's top chefs, some of Hollywood's biggest stars headlining their own venues, galleries featuring some of the world's most valuable art, and meta-resorts boasting the largest and most expansive casinos, spas, and more.
Having had personal access to these men, Wall Street Journal reporter Christina Binkley gives us a never-before-seen, up-close look at the trio of tycoons whose high-stakes gambles have made Sin City soar. Sharp, insightful, and revealing, this is the gripping story of how billions of dollars and the unparalleled drive for power made the personal visions of three moguls evolve from dreams to larger-than-life reality.
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Former Wall Street Journal reporter Binkley offers this story of the "trio of tycoons" who took over Las Vegas and transformed it from a "crushed-velvet world" with a "libidinous frontier air" into a place where, increasingly and sometimes surprisingly, "entertainment and good taste go hand in hand." Binkley provides an inside look at deal-maker Kerkorian, casino visionary Wynn and professor-turned-mogul Loveman and their lavishly competitive lives: their exclusive and "aggressive" tennis games, the one-way conveyor belt created to transport customers away from a competing casino, the battle to build the biggest and the best. The author shares intriguing details about these power players Wynn has a secret entrance, behind some fake books on a shelf, to a sprawling closet and is also adept at portraying a seedier Vegas, where aged Mafia barons dined "on the osso buco at Piero's Italian restaurant, their canes hanging from their chairs." Sometimes her chronology gets a little murky. Still, Binkley offers plenty of nuggets mined from her years on the beat, producing a full, flashy tale of powerful men and their pride, vanity, envy, greed and all the other cardinal no-nos that earned Vegas the name "Sin City."
